Herding all of the students out, means that new campuses are built in areas away from the city. This reduces traffic in the heart of the city (any campus can be a huge traffic generator). Large campuses can also cause problems with the rest of the older infrastructure (drains, sewers, electricity, etc). New campuses in greenfield areas brings new infrastructure, and provide new jog opportunities to people in outlying villages. The land is also a lot cheaper on the urban fringe.

The university migration to the countryside began around 2003 in both Beijing and Shanghai. It was met with dismay by students who had dreamed of the chance for city living and, possibly, an urban hukou.

What ever the official motivation, most faculty and students believed intercity land values precipitated the move to rural student ghettos.

In Beijing, CUFE built an office building on the Haidian canpus and leased commercial space while undergrads were shuffled out to Shahe near Changping (think Ming Tombs).

The Shanghai Accounting university was relocated two hours, by train, to the West.

As an aside, lookup "Battle of Langfang, 1900" for a perspectives on the Boxer Rebellion, missionaries, imperial armies (both pro and anti foreigner) and the Eight Nation Alliance for examples conflicting accounts of history.

Chenggong was always going to leave a huge footprint. It is the same with Baoshan in Shanghai. Regarding the notion of footprints, do you dilute and disperse, or concentrate and contain, the latter being equivalent to a smaller but more damaging footprint on an already overloaded infrastructure. There are always winners and losers, but an overloaded, ageing, infrastructure is one reason why Dianchi is the way it is.
Regardless of some views of urban planning, zoning is a basic part of an urban plan. It would suggest that planning is at least happening now.

You concentrate and contain. Urban density isn't the reason Dianchi is the way it is. Unmitigated runoff of hydrocarbon based chemical fertilizers into the lake basin, on the other hand, is. Ideally, a stricter runoff policy and more tactical urban density would go hand-in-hand.

Chenggong was always going to leave a huge footprint. It is the same with Baoshan in Shanghai. Regarding the notion of footprints, do you dilute and disperse, or concentrate and contain, the latter being equivalent to a smaller but more damaging footprint on an already overloaded infrastructure. There are always winners and losers, but an overloaded, ageing, infrastructure is one reason why Dianchi is the way it is.
Regardless of some views of urban planning, zoning is a basic part of an urban plan. It would suggest that planning is at least happening now. The free for all, of the past, is one reason why many cities are in such an environmentally poor state of health.
There will be a need to build new campuses for the growing student population. There will be demand for more industrial and commercial capacity, as well as places for the growing urban population to live. Zoning is an essential part of the planning process. New areas/satellite towns are also a part of the solution to a problem that won't fix itself. There will be an ecological footprint, like it or not we cannot live in a bubble.

Obviously zoning is important. But there's good zoning and there's bad zoning. Chenggong as realized so far is the worst kind of zoning - single-use, non-mixed use, and isolated from the real world. China needs to reform its education system so that future graduatea are more innovative. Innovation happens when students interact with the real world, not when they're sequestered in hermetically sealed satellite town bubbles

@geogramatt
What you stated is coming - it's in the prolific Five Year Plans, but one step at a time.

China's National or State level Five Year Plans generally state various social, environmental, economic, and military planning concepts. It's then up to each respective party representative to then begin designing strategies, pilots, projects, finance, social engineering, environmental impacts etc ad infinitum to put these conceptual designs into practice.

It's not a perfect science and depends heavily on an extremely diverse and diversified management system - but they're working on resolving that issue also.

The key are the pilot projects. Once a pilot is demonstrated successful (and hopefully sustainable), the rest of the nation piles in to replicated the success (or failure, if the business model proves unsustainable).

As an example - it's well known that China (and the rest of the world) are generally experiencing water management projects. China is now in as least it's second year of "Sponge City" technology and business demonstrators. Yuxi missed the cut last year, but made the highly competitive cut this year. GoKM had some recent articles on various incarnations of those water management pilots, from Kunming's water park to Yuxi's man-made waterfalls.

Management of students is highly sensitive, as a little knowledge is a dangerous weapon and students tend to be unrealistically idealistic.

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